Products - Predicted Potential Natural Vegetation of New Zealand
Matt McGlone, Susan Walker, John Leathwick, Craig Briggs
Landcare Research, New Zealand.
Data availability
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Brief ouline of data
Knowledge of New Zealand’s historic biodiversity assets is an essential pre-requisite for understanding and managing the value of our surviving indigenous ecosystems. It is particularly important in highly modified landscapes, where it provides a context for assessing the conservation value of surviving forest remnants, or can guide the setting of realistic objectives in ecosystem restoration projects (Leathwick 2001).
Predictably, survival of native vegetation has been uneven across New Zealand’s landscape, with the most extensive tracts of native forest occurring in environments unsuited to intensive human land uses because of their cool temperatures, high rainfall, and/or steep terrain (Leathwick et al. 2003a). Conversely, little indigenous biodiversity now survives in much of New Zealand’s lowlands, the greatest devastation having occurred in warm, dry climates on landforms prone to fire and/or suited to agriculture such as the Waikato, Manawatu, and in the east from East Cape to Southland (McGlone 1989, Leathwick et al. 2003b). In these latter environments the former character must be pieced together from information gleaned from historic accounts and from the remnants that survive, although these are often small and highly modified.
In the past, reconstructions of historic vegetation cover have been largely qualitative in nature (e.g., Holloway 1969, Molloy 1969, Stevens et al. 1988, McGlone et al. 1996) or derived from historic records (e.g., Johnston 1961, Hill 1963). However, recently developed statistical tools both for the interpolation of point climate data and the analysis of spatial patterns, greatly extend our ability to reconstruct the likely biological character of New Zealand’s pre-human past. Here we extend the preliminary statistical modelling based analysis of Leathwick (2001) using newly available high-resolution environmental data to reconstruct New Zealand’s potential vegetation pattern, i.e., that which could be expected in the absence of human activity.
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